Our History

In 2011 I rented a small 16 slot server for a few friends and family to play on. At this point I knew little to nothing about plugins or Minecraft servers and it was fun to learn while playing. After while we decided to open our server to the public with a small multi-world server hosting a few different game modes. Shortly after this I discovered Rob and the game mode DvZ thanks to Etho's and PauseUnPause's YouTube videos. I fell in love with the game and wanted to play it. At this time the game was only hosted by Rob at the weekends and sometimes randomly during the week for testing. I would stay up late and try get in a game but due to time zones and the amount of people trying to do the same it became difficult to play.

I had learned quite a lot about the plugins available over the few months of running the small public server and I was familiar with MagicSpells. As I watched Robs live streams I soon became aware of how the game was made and which plugins would be required to create the functionally. I found it really fun to try and recreate the game using the plugins I could find on bukkit.org and once I had a working version we tested with our public server for fun. The game was great success even with a small group of people on a tiny server it was still fun. After while the server was constantly full and luckily for us I had a friend called Alex who at the time owned a Minecraft server hosting company. He generously offered to host a 100 slot server for our community and our IP address became dvz.xelaservers.com. These where fun times and we all have great memories. The game had to be run manually so we could only host for few hours each day and it was incredible to see how many people would turn up each night. As I was trying to manage career/collage and general life the games would not always start at a set time so we started using TwitchTv to help organize the game. Things where going great and we started to automate the game bit by bit in the hope one day we could run the game 24/7.

We added VIP rank to thank those who contributed their time and help with map builds and running of games. At this time the server was just a fun project for me and we where no longer hosted at xelaservers so I was renting a shared machine that cost me around £30 ($50) a month. The server was often full and I started to received emails from players who wished they could join, some suggested they would make donations for reserved slots. This was not our intention as we didn't like the idea of priority over players but it did give us an idea of how we could grow our player limit. On December 21st 2012 we opened our donation shop using the BuyCraft system and to our surprise within hours people started donating. We could now afford to rent our own dedicated machine allowing us to remove lag caused by other shared hosting and increase our player limit. The dedicate server was located in Europe but gave a good connections worldwide and allowed use to hold double the players. We started to notice the majority of our donations came from players outside of Europe, this lead to us opening a second server in the USA.

Soon after getting the new hardware we released the automated version of the game and players could now join and play when it suited them. We soon reached a new problem of too many players for one game, thankfully a solution called BungeeCord had recently been released. BungeeCord allows us to create a network of Minecraft server that players can switch between without having to logout and switch IP address. We make donations to the Spigot team as a thank you for providing and maintaining BungeeCord for free.